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OLPC Game Jam for an XO Laptop

Posted by Zonk on from the think-of-the-children dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The OLPC project has announced a three-day game development jam session is scheduled to begin June 8 on the campus of Olin College, an engineering school in Needham, Massachusetts. 'The game jam is an opportunity for developers to create new types of games that rely on features of the XO's design such as mesh networking between nearby users, an integrated still or video camera, and a tablet mode for mobile gaming. Beyond creating games that teach specific tasks like counting or reading, OLPC hopes the contest will produce templates that allow kids to build their own games, according to OLPC's development guidelines.' The grand prize is a free OLPC laptop. All games created at the weekend-long event will be licensed under the GNU General Public License, and posted on the SourceForge site."

8 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Novelty item? by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How likely does the grand prize winner(s) need an OLPC laptop?

    If you're taking part in this competition, chances are very good that you support the mission of the OLPC program. If you win and receive an actual unit, it just makes further development and testing for the platform that much easier for you. It's more about supporting the goal than it is about the payout (hey, isn't that what OSS is generally about?).

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    This guy's the limit!
  2. Or hey by Kamineko · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Here's a better idea: release some kind of unified API that will allow folks with regular hardware to build games for the OLPC.

  3. Re:Novelty item? by grumbel · · Score: 2, Insightful

    A laptop with a 200dpi displays would be very useful in the first world as well, affordable ebook readers are pretty rare and the OLPCs XO laptop looks like a pretty nice machine in that category.

  4. Re:Airfare? by bfields · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How is it possible for the vast majority of people who wish to compete in these events to do so without having to spend hundreds of dollars on round-trip airfare?

    It looks like there's also a $100 registration fee, but that includes food and lodging for the event. Seems to me like they're actually working pretty hard to keep it inexpensive. There's also a scholarship to reduce the costs for students. I'm sure they'd be happy to do more, given the money--see their donation page if you know anyone that could chip in.

  5. Re:Novelty item? by furball · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm willing to bet you can get a VMWare/Parallels/etc. configuration to mimmic an OLPC laptop that'd make testing and development much easier than with OLPC itself.

  6. Re:Novelty item? by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I do quite a bit of development for my PDA and whilst I have an emulator environment for it whilst developing, nothing says "usability test" better than putting it on the device and going sitting away from a real pc with a mouse.

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    liqbase :: faster than paper
  7. Re:Novelty item? by ClassMyAss · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's more about supporting the goal than it is about the payout (hey, isn't that what OSS is generally about?).
    True. Though as a New Englander that might have considered attending, it would have been better if TFA had been posted before the May 20 deadline to register instead of a week late...
  8. Re:Brilliant! by nirjhari · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Games and play are only for rich kids, I suppose... How dare they...